60 Minutes Tries to Destroy the Legal Marijuana Argument, Fails Miserably
Remember When 60 Minutes Tried to Bring Down Legal Cannabis in Colorado? from CannabisNet on Vimeo.
The recent 60 Minutes piece on CBS clearly set out to set a negative tone for legal marijuana. As with all reefer madness articles, this piece just falls apart as the producers look for negative spooky stories about legal marijuana in Colorado and just can’t find them. To watch the full piece on CBS, click here.
Let’s go through the piece, it is only 13 minutes long and see how foolish this hack job reporting is on legal marijuana. It reeks of a Sheldon Adelson funded anti pot piece, and, as usual, it can’t come up with any compelling data against the legalization of marijuana.
0:00 -4:05 The piece visits the Los Suenos recreational grow facility in Pueblo, Colorado. It is run by a father son team from North Carolina who have invested $10 million into the business. They are the largest recreational grow facility in the USA, with 21,600 plants and doing around 22,000 lbs of cannabis a year. The piece points out that each plant must be registered in a database, have a radio transmitter attached to it, and be tracked from seed to sale. Next up, the security and technology at the grow is outstanding. 289 cameras to monitor all the plants in the facility. Full time security force, 24 hours a day, and fences and secured borders.
After the bud is picked and trimmed it is stored in a beautiful area in a formation like whiskey barrels would be stored. They are then inspected by the state for quality control.
Marijuana has created 1,300 new jobs in Pueblo (above the table) and 60 new businesses. All employees of Los Suenos farm have a background check and finger print file done.
Honestly, the marijuana industry couldn’t look any better up through 4 minutes of this 13 minute piece.
4:15 to 6:20 - Emergency room doctor from Pueblo who works in the baby unit and says there is an uptick in newborns with THC in the blood. He states that in the first 9 months, 27 babies have come through with THC in their blood. That is 3 per month. I would love to know the number of babies in the first 9 months that have come through with alcohol fetus syndrome and cocaine or crack in their system.
Both are terrible, but this is again a witch hunt similar to “kids will eat our edibles, it is going to cause massive emergency room visits.” Facts show 160 kids a day across the USA go to the emergency for the ingestion of prescription drugs left open or own tables. Kids going to the emergency room for eating marijuana edibles stands at 14….for the year.
The doctor then notes that most new mom’s response is that they didn’t know it was bad for the baby since it was a legal drug. Well, legal drugs like ADD medicine and ADHC pills are also bad pregnant. It sounds like an education problem, not a drug problem.
6:20 - Emergency room visits for teens with marijuana in their system is up this year 70% in Pueblo, but they never say if marijuana was the CAUSE of the visit. They never mentioned if any of them had to stay overnight. Was a kid stoned at home and tried to open a can of beans and cut his finger open. That would be an emergency room visit for a teen with marijuana in their blood. The segment also points out that Colorado has seen NO SPIKE in teen marijuana use or driving accidents due to marijuana legalization.
7:10 - Black market is still alive and well as we take a tour with sheriffs on some of the illegal grows they go after. Scary stories of Russian mafia and South East Asia drug cartels are thrown around. Yes, the black market is still there because others states haven’t legalized it and allowed more grow facilities. Margins are already compressing on marijuana as the whole sale price in Colorado was at $800 per pound this year. If California, Nevada, Arizona, and Canada all allow full grow licenses, what do you think happens to the price of weed in the next 2 years? Remember, crime organizations only are interested in a drug if they can make money selling it. Drive the legal price down and crime organizations can’t make any money with it either. Make it legal federally and you put crime out of business. This is the whole theory on ending the War on Drugs and how it has been a failure.
9:24 – Scary images of a teen smoking and then a freeway, yet the narrator says there has been no evidence to show any spike in teen use or driving issues while using cannabis. Again, there is no evidence in Colorado of teen use going up or driving accidents increasing with legal recreational cannabis per the narrator.
10:24 –13:30 This is a great part of the video; Colorado Governor Hickenlooper get face time to sit down one on one and explain the evils of marijuana. When asked if other states should allow recreational marijuana, he doesn’t say no. He says they should take a wait and see approach and move slowly. It is also mentioned during this time that Colorado has had $140 million in tax revenue come in due to marijuana.
Wait, what?
Governor Hickenlooper says he sees enough good things that he doesn’t want to turn back the clock and make it illegal, but there just isn’t enough data to recommend it to other states. He suggests to let Colorado build up some more data on teen use and driving (remember, there has been no spike seen in over a year now) before other states jump in
Really?
I bet there are 140,000,000 reasons why the Governor would like to see his neighboring states like California, Nevada, and Arizona all wait on legalizing recreational use and give Colorado a few more years to “gather data”.
I understand that governors try to protect their states’ interest and such but this was laugh out loud funny. “Well, we like what we see and we don’t want to turn back the clock, but why don’t you other states gives us a few more years to build up some more data before you guys go legal and cut into our tax revenue.”
Reefer Madness and 60 Minutes, alive and well in 2016.
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